First image of omicron coronavirus variant shows many more mutations in area that interacts with human cells

Vishwam Sankaran

Mon., November 29, 2021

First image of omicron coronavirus variant shows many more mutations in area that interacts with human cells


Researchers have revealed the first image of omicron, the new coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa and Botswana, which shows that it has more mutations than the currently predominant Delta variant.

The 3D image of omicron, produced and published by the Bambino Gesu hospital in Rome, reveals that the variant has many mutations concentrated in the spike (S) protein — the part of the novel coronavirus that enables it to enter human cells.

“We can clearly see that the omicron variant presents many more mutations than the delta variant, concentrated above all in one area of the protein that interacts with human cells,” the researchers said in a statement on Sunday. “This does not automatically mean that these variations are more dangerous, simply that the virus has further adapted to the human species by generating another variant.”

The scientists called for further studies to unravel if the adaptation seen in the variant is “neutral, less dangerous, or more dangerous”.

First photo of the omicron variant (B.1.1.529), SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern (Bambin Gesù)

Scientists have found about 50 mutations in omicron, 30 of which are on the S protein, and half of those in the receptor-binding domain – the part that binds to the ACE2 receptor on human cells through which the virus enters tissues.

The red dots in the image, researchers said, indicate areas with “very high variability,” while the orange ones are those with “high variability”, and the yellow ones with “medium variability.” Green dots are parts of the S protein showing low difference between the two variants, while the gray area shows portions that do not vary.

“Case numbers tripled in 3 days in South Africa to 2,828, but this is perhaps partly because of intensive monitoring, although it is possible that the transmission rate is double that of delta (R=2) and the doubling time is about 4.8 days,” Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine, Imperial College London, said in a statement on Saturday.

“South Africa is going into summer and rates of delta are very low, so hard to say if omicron competes over delta,” Dr Openshaw added.

On Friday, the World Health Organisation noted that there could be an increased risk of reinfection with the new B.1.1529 coronavirus variant, named omicron, compared to other variants of concern.

“The number of cases of this variant appears to be increasing in almost all provinces in South Africa,” the WHO noted in a statement on Friday. “In recent weeks, infections have increased steeply, coinciding with the detection of B.1.1.529 variant.”

While the number of people testing positive has risen in areas of South Africa affected by this variant, the WHO says further studies are underway to understand if the surge in cases is because of omicron or other factors.

The WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Virus Evolution also highlighted that it is still unclear whether infection with omicron causes more severe disease compared to infections with other variants.

“While preliminary data suggests that there are increasing rates of hospitalisation in South Africa, this may be due to increasing overall numbers of people becoming infected, rather than a result of a specific infection with omicron,” the experts noted in a statement on Sunday.

They urged all countries to enhance surveillance and sequencing efforts to better understand circulating variants of the novel coronavirus, and submit complete genome sequences and associated metadata to a publicly available database, such as GISAID.

The WHO and several health experts across the world have called for increasing global vaccine equity to ensure that new variants of concern do not emerge.

“It is very likely that current vaccines will protect against severe disease with omicron as they do for all the previously identified virus variants. But this does highlight the need to remain vigilant – the pandemic is not over,” Lawrence Young, virologist and professor of molecular oncology at Warwick Medical School, said.

THIRD WORLD USA

Millions of Americans struggle to pay their water bills – here's how a national water aid program could work


Joseph Cook, Associate Professor of Economic Sciences, Washington State University
Mon, November 29, 2021

Water: an increasingly expensive necessity. iStock via Getty Images

Running water and indoor plumbing are so central to modern life that most Americans take them from granted. But these services aren’t free, and millions struggle to afford them. A 2019 survey found that U.S. households in the bottom fifth of the economy spent 12.4% of their disposable income on water and sewer services. News reports suggest that for low-income households, this burden has increased during the pandemic.

Since 1981, the federal government has helped low-income households with their energy costs through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. But there had not been a national water aid program until Congress created a temporary Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program as part of the COVID-19 response. Now the House-passed Build Back Better Act includes US$225 million for grants to states and tribes to help reduce the cost of water services for low-income households.

As an economist specializing in environmental and natural resource issues, I’m encouraged to see this idea gaining support. But I also know from analyzing efforts at the local level that these programs may be ineffective if they aren’t well designed. I believe the U.S. can learn lessons from Chile, which has run an effective national water assistance program for 30 years.

Flaws in US local aid programs

I have studied water and sewer customer assistance programs around the world and developed a database of examples run by U.S. utilities in cities including Seattle, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Although there are hundreds of these programs, three major problems undercut their effectiveness.

First, because utilities have to fund their assistance programs from their own budgets, they typically charge “non-poor” customers higher rates and use those payments to subsidize low-income customers. State regulations often forbid this, forcing utilities in those states to rely on voluntary donation programs to fund assistance.

Second, in areas with high poverty, too many customers need help and there are not enough non-poor customers to foot the bill.

Third, smaller and less well-funded utilities often do not have administrative capacity or expertise to design and implement their own customer assistance programs.
These challenges have spurred politicians and policy experts to call for a federal program – a step that the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council recommended back in 2003.

Learning from Chile’s experience

Agencies such as the World Bank often cite Chile’s water aid program as a model. Here’s how it works:

The program aims to ensure that households don’t pay more than 3% of their income for receiving a quantity of water to meet their essential needs. There is no consensus among experts on what this “lifeline” quantity of water should be, but Chile sets it at 15 cubic meters per month – about 4,000 gallons.

Eligible customers apply to their city government every three years. Once enrolled, they immediately see reductions in their bills, based on their poverty levels, for that first 15 cubic meters of water use. Each month, the water utility bills the city for subsidies it has provided to poor customers.

If households use more than 15 cubic meters of water per month, they pay unsubsidized prices for whatever they use above that level. This gives everyone an incentive to fix leaky pipes and appliances and conserve water. Regulators who set water prices are not involved in running the subsidy system or determining subsidy levels.

In the late 1990s, Chile launched a major expansion of its sewage treatment plants. Water utilities raised their rates by 34% to 142% between 1998 and 2015 to pay for this initiative. Because these rate increases outpaced growth in income, subsidies grew by 54% over the same time period. The takeaway: Chile found a way to pay for water and sewer investment while still protecting the poor.

How a US water aid program might work

If the U.S. creates a national water aid program, key questions will include who is eligible and how much water is an “essential” quantity for households. The EPA estimates that an average U.S. household uses approximately 9,000 gallons per month, but one-third of this is for gardens and lawns. Reliable national data on U.S. household water usage is nearly nonexistent, and there is no estimate of how much water low-income households use.

Program managers would need to collect information on utility water and sewer pricing structures, put it in a database and couple it with census data to estimate the number of eligible households in each state.

To estimate what a program like Chile’s might cost here, my team at Washington State University compiled a database of water and sewer rates as of December 2019. We included all U.S. cities with populations over 100,000, at least two cities per state, and made assumptions about rates for smaller cities and towns.

We estimate that a program covering the full cost of 4,500 gallons of water per month for households at or below the poverty line would cost approximately $11.2 billion annually if 70% of eligible households participate. In total, we estimate that 11.8 million households would receive an average subsidy of $67 per month.

Our project website includes a calculator tool to estimate the annual federal cost based on different assumptions about eligibility, participation, the “essential” water quantity and the percentage discount on water bills.

Another approach: Add money to SNAP payments

Public policy scholar Manny Teodoro has suggested another way to deliver water aid: topping up support that people receive to buy healthy food through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Louisiana Purchase card, issued by the state the SNAP recipients.

This idea builds on a well-known program with a long track record. Low-income households would not have to file new paperwork to receive benefits. Delivering water aid this way could help renters, whose water costs often are rolled into their rent, and rural residents who use well water and have to pay for water treatment and maintenance costs out of pocket.

It would place less of an administrative burden on the large number of small U.S. water systems serving fewer than 500 people. And it could be quickly implemented by adding water providers as approved vendors for electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card payments.

Eligibility for SNAP is set at 138% of the poverty line, and an estimated 84% of eligible households participate. With these parameters, we estimate that a program covering 100% of the cost of 4,500 gallons of water per month would cost $17 billion annually. The main weakness of this approach is that water and sewer rates vary across the country, so it risks providing too much or too little assistance to low-income households depending on where they live.

Getting water prices right for everyone

Access to a safe and affordable water supply and sewer services is codified in the U.N.‘s Human Right to Water and Sanitation. The U.S. is a wealthy country, and my research group’s estimates show that the cost of a targeted program to help the poor pay their bills is reasonable.

Without federal funding, poor and marginalized households will continue to fall behind on their bills and experience the indignity and health risks of having their water turned off.

At the same time, the U.S. needs to make major investments in its water and sewer infrastructure and manage the effects of drought and climate change. Economists broadly agree that water should be more expensive in many places to give local governments and ratepayers incentive to conserve and plan for a water-scarce future. I believe Chile’s experience shows how a national program can preserve this signal while directing most of its water sector subsidies toward protecting the poor.

Research Assistant Nick Kraabel assisted in estimating the nationwide costs discussed in this article.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Joseph Cook, Washington State University.

GREENWASHING

Oil Nations Are Selling Billions In Green Bonds

Editor OilPrice.com
Sat, November 27, 2021

Not too long ago, green investing was associated with a warm moral glow, but it wasn’t mainstream--not by a long shot. Increasing climate awareness, a growing shift in policy, and investors demanding socially and environmentally conscious options are transforming this, however, and while it still may not be mainstream, it’s working rather quickly toward megatrend status.

Over the past half-decade, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing has emerged as the single biggest global megatrend. Every year, more than $3 trillion in new global funds flow into the $30 trillion ESG market.

Meanwhile, green bonds have become the latest craze in the ESG sector, with French asset management company with €1.729 trillion of assets under management, Amundi, now the world’s largest issuer of green bonds. The green bond market is truly booming; in 2020, governments and companies issued green bonds worth $297 billion, with the forecasts for this year being $500 billion and $1 trillion in 2022.

And now, the green bond sector has attracted an unlikely customer: Oil-producing countries.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar have all lined up billions of dollars worth of green bonds as they step up their game to fight climate change.

Green Bonds

Tackling the climate crisis won’t come cheap, with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimating that limiting the temperature increase to 2C will require ~$3 trillion of investment every year through 2050. To raise those vast sums, governments and corporations everywhere are increasingly turning to the green bond market.

Green bonds essentially work like regular bonds but with one key difference: the money raised is used exclusively to finance green projects such as renewable energy and green buildings.

With countries around the world stepping up their efforts to reduce carbon emissions, the market for green bonds is booming. For instance, in October, the European Union issued about $14 billion of green bonds, marking the highest amount ever. Proceeds from the bonds will be used to finance projects, including a research platform for the energy transition in Belgium and wind power plants in Lithuania. Orders exceeded the securities available by more than 11 times in the EU deal, highlighting that it can cost less to issue green bonds than the conventional variety.

Oil-producing nations are waking up to this phenomenon, with Saudi Arabia’s $430 billion sovereign wealth fund planning to announce its first green debt issuance as it looks to drum up investment for renewable energy and other sustainable projects. One such project is the green megacity of Neom located to the country’s north.

The Saudi government has announced plans to build a $5 billion green hydrogen plant that will power Neom when it opens in 2025. Dubbed Helios Green Fuels, the hydrogen plant will use solar and wind energy to generate 4GW of clean energy that will be used to produce hydrogen.

But here’s the main kicker: Helios could even produce hydrogen that’s cheaper than oil.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) estimates that Helios’ costs could reach $1.50 per kilogram by 2030, way cheaper than the average cost of green hydrogen at $5 per kilogram and even cheaper than gray hydrogen made from cracking natural gas. Saudi Arabia enjoys a serious competitive advantage in the green hydrogen business thanks to its perpetual sunshine, wind, and vast tracts of unused land.

In fact, Saudi Aramco has told investors that it has abandoned immediate plans to develop its LNG sector in favor of hydrogen. Aramco has said that the kingdom’s immediate plan is to produce enough natural gas for domestic use to stop burning oil in its power plants and convert the remainder into hydrogen. Blue hydrogen is made from natural gas either by Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) or AutoThermal Reforming (ATR) with the CO2 generated captured and then stored. As the greenhouse gasses are captured, this mitigates the environmental impacts on the planet.

Saudi Arabia clearly has its eyes on a future whereby the economy will stop relying too heavily on oil. Whether or not it will remain committed enough to achieve its long-term goal is another question.

Saudi Arabia’s regional peers are at it, too.

This year, the UAE’s biggest government-controlled bank issued at least $1.36 billion in green debt, while Reuters revealed in October that Qatar Energy, a state-owned oil company, is planning a green bond issue worth several billions of dollars.

Legit Bonds or Greenwashing?

For many years, Big Oil has been chided for its outsized role in climate change and even pilloried for trying to burnish its green credentials with half-hearted attempts at clean energy investments, aka greenwashing. The recrimination appears well deserved, considering the sector dedicates a minuscule amount of its capital spending to renewable energy despite its operations being responsible for 15% of greenhouse gas emissions.

And now, the likes of Saudi Arabia risk falling into the same trap if their oil production roadmaps are any indication.

After all, Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, has announced plans to boost oil production further, from the current 12 million barrels a day to 13 million barrels a day by 2027.

The UAE has an even more aggressive growth plan, with state-controlled oil company ADNOC saying it will increase oil output by 25% to produce 5 billion barrels a day by 2030. Meanwhile, Qatar continues to invest heavily in African oilfields and is building the world’s largest liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal.

A recent study by Dutch asset manager NN Investment Partners found that the green bond market is currently fraught with various legal issues, with 15% of all green bond issues “coming from companies involved in controversial practices that contravene environmental standards.”

An oil-producing nation can easily violate the spirit of green bonds, for instance, by using fossil fuels to generate ‘green hydrogen.’ This is hardly a far-fetched idea: Amundi recently threatened to withdraw its exposure to the State Bank of India’s green bonds after it emerged that the bank was financing a coal mine in Australia.

Drawing clear lines between pools of money and their expenditure requires a high degree of transparency, something that countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar are, unfortunately, not famed for. Ultimately, this points to a real and urgent need to develop clear standards and criteria with high granularity as this market escalates.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

WWII contaminants on an Aleutian island are one step closer to finally being cleaned up

© 2021 TomTom

Great Sitkin Island

Volcanic Island

Great Sitkin Island is a volcanic island in the Andreanof Islands of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. The island covers a total area of 60 square miles and lies slightly north of a group of islands which are located between Adak Island and Atka Island.

Morgan Krakow, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
Sun, November 28, 2021

Nov. 29—Richard Ragle looked at the island as the boat pulled up. He'd studied historical photographs of Great Sitkin Island for years, but it wasn't exactly what he expected — some things were bigger and others were smaller than he had imagined.

The island, nestled into the Aleutians, has grasses that grow so tall they're difficult to walk through. It's green and lush, but has a rugged coastline and a tall ridge often obscured by clouds. And there's a volcano towering above, a snowy peak mottled with ash deposits, Ragle said.

After a summer of field work, Great Sitkin Island is now closer to being cleaned up after functioning as a naval refueling station during World War II and being abandoned.

Ragle is a project manager with the Army Corps of Engineers who works for the Formerly Used Sites program — known as FUDS — in which the U.S. Defense Department hires the Corps to clean up sites where the agency no longer owns the property.

In the case of Great Sitkin Island, it's now owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

There are more than 100 FUDS projects around Alaska and 77 have been cleaned up so far, with 60 more to go, according to Ragle.

The projects are ranked as a way to guide funding requests for cleanup, Ragle said. After an initial investigation determined the level of risk at Great Sitkin, the project was paused so the Corps could address projects with greater risk, which tended to be closer to population centers.

"Great Sitkin has finally worked its way up high enough on the list that we could request funding for it," he said.

That occurred in 2014, and from there experts analyzed old photographs of the island to try to identify where disturbances occurred, which ultimately culminated in a 2021 summer of field work on the island, Ragle said.

Workers spent 65 days over the summer investigating the extent of contamination there.

A refueling base, a tsunami and burning fuel

The island was once used as a naval refueling station during World War II. Tanks there stored more than 10 million gallons of fuel.

"Those tanks were not full when the Navy abandoned the facility, but they were not empty either," Ragle said.

Construction on what was called the Sand Bay Naval Station began in 1942. It could accommodate as many as 680 people plus had places to store fuel, but by 1949 only 10 people remained on the island. Naval ships heading west during World War II refueled at Great Sitkin on the way to Japan, Ragle said.

In 1957, a tsunami hit the island. The wave reworked a lot of the infrastructure near the coast on the island, disturbing and resituating things like the dump, buildings and utility poles, said Tim Plucinski, an environmental contaminants biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"At least the mess prior to that, I think, was all consolidated in specific areas," Plucinski said. "But after that tsunami hit, I think it kind of mixed everything back up again."

The Navy abandoned Great Sitkin in 1963, according to the Corps.

In order to clean up leaking fuel in the following decade, the Navy burned it, "in some cases by breaching the sides of the storage tanks with explosives and lighting the pool of liquid with incendiary grenades," the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.

Ragle said that appeared to be a common practice at the time — there are photos of the Navy taking similar measures on Attu Island as well.

"We don't have lots of records for what actually occurred," Ragle said. "But the plan was to release fuel out of the tanks and burn it."

There are some notes that the efforts were successful with some tanks and less so with others, he said.

In the 1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service found several petroleum spills and seeps as well as lead, chromium and other contaminants in the soil, according to information from the Corps. By the 1990s, the site was listed as a FUDS property, and for several years afterward, different steps were taken toward cleanup through analysis and a few site visits.

Finally, in 2019 a contract was awarded to investigate several features at the site. During the summer of 2021, a contractor worked to figure out how much contamination was left on Great Sitkin.

Investigators sampled soil at the surface of the island, where it's available to wildlife, to figure out the risk to different animals, Ragle said. They also used different techniques to find petroleum underground.

Cleanup completion timeline uncertain

The current project is the first significant effort of its kind at Great Sitkin since the inception of the FUDS program, Plucinski said. It's one of 29 FUDS sites within the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, he said.

"The fact is, prior to the Department of Defense's occupation of these sites, they were much more in their native state and with human occupation and then in a lot of cases the military just walking away, I just see that they're taking on the responsibility of cleaning these places up," Plucinski said.

Thick, viscous bunker fuel and fluid heating fuel were found on the island as well as aviation fuel, diesel and gasoline, he said. And while petroleum is the "most prevalent concern on Great Sitkin," there's also concern surrounding lead batteries, metals and solvents as well as questions about whether certain contaminants made it into groundwater and creeks.

There are major seabird populations on and near Great Sitkin, but no major nesting areas, he said. However, the contaminants might impact the habitats of terrestrial birds like lapland longspurs, rosy finches and ptarmigan.

Plus, there are rats on the island. Rats have often been brought to islands by the military, Plucinski said. In the treeless Aleutians, rats can devastate birds that nest on the ground.

"We talk about a rat spill — we call them spills — being more ecologically damaging than actually the contaminants themselves," Plucinski said.

[From the archives: Birds are returning to a now rodent-free island in the Aleutians formerly known as Rat Island]

A final report about the investigation is still multiple months away, Ragle said, since contractors collected massive amounts of data during the summer.

"But on a grander scale, the site was not as dirty as I personally expected," Ragle said.

Most of the contamination wasn't as deep as he'd initially anticipated, which should make cleanup efforts easier. Once they figure out the extent and nature of the leftover fuel, Ragle said, they can come up with ways to clean it.

But in terms of when the island will be cleaned up, it's not clear just yet. FUDS projects can take a lot of time.

"It's really important that we clean up the environment," Plucinski said. "And turn it to as close to a natural state as we possibly can."

Barren forests, dirty rivers, unbreathable air: Inside an Arctic city's vast pollution problem

LONG READ

Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News
Sun, November 28, 2021, 6:40 AM·17 min read

This article is part of “The Fifth Crime,” a series on ecocide published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news outlet that covers climate, energy and the environment, and Undark Magazine, a nonprofit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society.

It was 2 a.m. and the sun was shining, as it does day and night in mid-July in Norilsk, a Siberian city 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Igor Klyushin went to the bank of the river where he used to fish with his father for grayling, a dorsal-finned beauty known for its graceful leaps above the surface. “A very merry fish,” Klyushin recalled. “It enjoys cold and clean, clean water.”

He doubted grayling would be there that night. In any event, authorities had long warned that it was unsafe to fish for them in the Daldykan River.

And besides, he wasn’t there to fish. He began to record images of the clay-colored muck flowing downriver from one of the largest metal mining and smelting complexes in the world. The discolored water represented “the latest environmental crime of Norilsk Nickel,” Klyushin said in the video he posted on “Norilchane” — or “Citizens of Norilsk” — the YouTube channel he helps moderate.The channel and its Facebook group, with about 8,300 members, have become gathering places for distressed residents of Norilsk, the northernmost city in the world. The city of 176,000 has long been recognized by environmentalists — and even by the Russian government — as one of the most polluted places on Earth, because of one business: Norilsk Nickel, the world’s biggest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel and a top producer of platinum, cobalt and copper.

Built as a resource colony by prisoners in the Soviet Gulag, Norilsk outlasted communism, embraced capitalism, and it now aims to ramp up production to sell the metals needed for electric vehicle batteries and the clean energy economy. Norilsk Nickel is the world’s leading producer of the high-purity Class 1 nickel that electric vehicle industry leaders like Tesla CEO Elon Musk are seeking. The company’s ambitions coincide with those of Russian President Vladimir Putin for greater development in the Far North, which he maintains can be accomplished sustainably.

Image: Norilsk, Russia. (Getty Images)

But Norilsk Nickel has undermined its own vision for the future by spoiling a priceless environment, with implications for the entire planet. The company’s pollution has carved a barren landscape of dead and dying trees out of the taiga, or boreal forest, one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. Its wastewater has turned glacial rivers red. Its smokestacks belch out the worst sulfur dioxide pollution in the world. And last year, a corroded tank burst and released 6.5 million gallons of diesel fuel into waters that flow to the Kara Sea. It was the largest oil spill in Arctic history. Although Norilsk Nickel maintains that no diesel fuel made it to the Arctic Ocean, the Russian government’s fisheries science agency told Inside Climate News that its testing showed that the contamination had reached that far.

In September, Norilsk Nickel agreed to negotiate the settlement of an $800 million lawsuit that the federal fisheries agency, known as Rosrybolovstvo, filed against the company this summer over the damage to the region’s aquatic resources.

Norilsk is an example of the kind of systematic and long-term devastation that has animated a global movement to make destruction of nature an international crime. The campaign aims to treat “ecocide” in the same way as genocide or crimes against humanity, offenses prosecutable by the Hague-based International Criminal Court. The ecocide campaign has drawn attention to the failure of national laws to halt severe and widespread or long-term damage that has international consequences.

Norilsk is grappling with such damage, both as part of a region that is especially vulnerable to climate change and as a city reliant on an industry that has poisoned its land and water.

Norilsk Nickel maintains that it can rehabilitate its environment. It paid a $2 billion fine for last year’s diesel spill, the largest environmental penalty in the country’s history, and it has pledged to spend more than $5 billion on both pollution control and economic and social revitalization throughout its territory of Krasnoyarsk Krai.

“We do acknowledge that there are legacy issues relating to our business,” a company spokesman said in written responses to questions from Inside Climate News, referring to the problems left over from the Soviet era. “We are implementing far-reaching measures to address them.”

Local government officials are enthusiastic about Norilsk Nickel’s program. The city and the territory plan to build a hospital, renovate housing and even create an Arctic Museum of Modern Art. Krasnoyarsk Krai Gov. Alexander Uss has proposed making Norilsk the official capital of the Russian Arctic.

But residents like Klyushin are skeptical, given the pollution they’ve seen even after the company paid its fine.

“When I came that night to see the Daldykan, my heart really sank, and it was broken,” Klyushin said, speaking by phone through an interpreter two weeks after he took video of the discolored water in July. “The river was red with pulp, and the chemical smell is still in my lungs.”

Image: A dead fish on the shore of the Ambarnaya River outside Norilsk on June 10, 2020. (Irina Yarinskaya / AFP via Getty Images)

Dying forests and pollution visible from space

The story of Norilsk’s pollution is written in the trees: 5.9 million acres of dead and dying boreal forest downwind from the Norilsk Nickel compound — a scar larger than New Jersey, slashed into the largest forested region on Earth.

In tree ring samples, scientists have pinpointed the great rush of sulfur dioxide pollution that began in 1942, when the first nickel smelter geared up to meet the Soviet Union’s need for stainless steel during World War II. And the tree rings have shown how the rate of forest deaths here jumped in the 1960s, from 5 percent annually to 30 percent annually at one research site, said a study that researchers from Siberian Federal University and the University of Cambridge published last year. The discovery at that time of huge new ore reserves gave Norilsk Nickel “a new lease on life,” the company noted in its official history.

Image: Smoke stacks for a nickel-refinery spew sulfur dioxide into the environment July 21, 2002 in Norilsk, Russia. (Oleg Nikishin / Getty Images file)

By the early 1980s, all larch trees within 40 miles east of Norilsk were dead.

Satellite readings show that no other human enterprise — no power plant, no oil field, no other smelter complex — generates as much sulfur dioxide pollution as Norilsk Nickel. In fact, the only entities on Earth that rival its sulfur emissions are erupting volcanoes, according to a monitoring project led by scientists at NASA and Environment Canada. At 1.9 million tons of sulfur dioxide emissions annually, Norilsk produces as much sulfur pollution as the entire U.S. — all concentrated in a city the size of Eugene, Oregon.

“You cannot breathe there,” Valeriya “Lera” Bolgova, a leader of the Nganasan people, one of five Indigenous tribes of the Taimyr peninsula, said in an interview. The region’s first people have been unique witnesses to Norilsk Nickel’s indelible imprint on the environment, because fish and reindeer meat are still central to their diets.

“When the pollution proceeds, and proceeds as intensively as it is nowadays, both the fish and the animals start looking for a cleaner environment,” Bolgova said.

Valeriya

Researchers from Siberian Federal University affirmed that the reindeer patterns have dramatically changed on Taimyr. They found the average stay of the reindeer at their traditional summer calving and feeding place to be just 63 days, a third of what it was in the 1960s.

As for human health, lung cancer mortality is 1.2 to 2.5 times higher in Norilsk than in other Russian cities, and deaths from cardiovascular disease and infectious diseases also are elevated, according to the latest research. Such elevated rates are difficult to tie to a single source, and their cause hasn’t yet been established.

It is difficult to study life expectancy in Norilsk because so many people retire early and move to warmer climates, where their health outcomes aren’t captured in the city’s statistics.

“They hope to start getting this higher pension and then go to the mainland and live this beautiful life,” said Klyushin, whose father and uncle were among those who left. His father died a few years ago at age 61, and his uncle died before he was 60.
A ‘mountain river’ of diesel fuel

Klyushin and other local environmental activists agitated for years for Rosprirodnadzor, the Russian environmental protection agency, to establish an office in Norilsk.

They succeeded early last year, and the job of chief deputy went to Vasily Ryabinin, then 39, a chemist, who had previously worked at Norilsk Nickel but left after his beloved mentor at the company died of cancer, he said in an interview with Inside Climate News.

Yet the warm, spring day when 6.5 million gallons of diesel fuel spilled from the Norilsk Nickel complex into the Daldykan River marked both the beginning and the end of Ryabinin’s career as an environmental enforcer for the Russian government.

In the days leading up to May 29, 2020, the temperature in the region had risen 18 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, according to one scientific study. Permafrost had begun to give way under a corroded fuel tank at Norilsk Nickel’s power plant that Russian government safety inspectors had deemed unstable two years earlier and that the company had never fixed.

Ryabinin received a phone call from his boss, who had been denied entry to investigate at the nickel plant, saying red pollution had been spotted in the river. Ryabinin joined him outside the plant, but they were turned away by security, backed up by police.

Ryabinin, who is both a mountaineer and a photographer, took his hiking boots and a camera and walked 2 kilometers with his boss to a nearby bridge, where they could see “an absolute mountain river” of diesel fuel spilling into the waterways, Ryabinin said. “My boss was even afraid to actually smoke, because the smell was so strong it was possible these vapors could ignite some kind of explosion,” he added.

Ryabinin told his story in a 45-minute video posted later on the Norilchane YouTube channel. His broadcast and photographs were the first account that reached the outside world about the largest known oil spill in the Arctic. If it had occurred in the U.S., it would have ranked among the country’s top 10 spills, more than half the size of the Exxon Valdez spill and six times larger than the 2010 pipeline spill of tar sands oil in the Kalamazoo River.

An aerial view shows the pollution in a river outside Norilsk on June 6, 2020, after a subsidiary of metals giant Norilsk Nickel's massive diesel spill on May 29. 

(Irina Yarinskava / AFP via Getty Images)

Top Rosprirodnadzor officials flew in from Moscow. The company deployed containment booms and hundreds of workers to clean up. But Ryabinin felt it was an unwinnable race with the river current. He pressed to sample the water downstream in Lake Pyasino for contamination, but his superiors told him no transportation was available. Six days later the head of Rosprirodnadzor declared that no oil had reached the lake, which connects to the Arctic Ocean. Norilsk Nickel said the same.

Ryabinin, feeling he was being prevented from determining the true extent of damage to the environment, turned in his resignation.

One of Russia’s most prominent ecologists, Evgeny Shvarts of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for Geography in Moscow, told Inside Climate News he is convinced from long experience as an environmental advocate in Russia that people can’t rely on the government for environmental protection.

Shvarts has been a member of Norilsk Nickel’s board of directors since 2019, one of the independent directors the company is required to have because it is traded on the London Stock Exchange. Shvarts holds no stock in Norilsk Nickel and isn’t in the corporate chain of command under the majority shareholder, the oligarch Vladimir Potanin.

Shvarts believes independent directors and other requirements of the public markets are especially important in Russia, where, he said, the government doesn’t have the tools necessary to implement environmental laws. “It is a very naive approach to think that the state always represents the public interest,” he said.

After Klyushin saw pollution in the Daldykan River again in July, he notified the regulatory agencies. The Ministry of Natural Resources responded with a letter that Klyushin shared with Inside Climate News. In it, the ministry detailed Norilsk Nickel’s reported discharges into waterways for the first quarter of 2021: cobalt, 32,318 tons, or four times the legal limit; iron, 3,998 tons, or 45 times the legal limit; and nickel, 989 tons, or 100 times the legal limit. The discharges exceeded the “normative permissible standards,” the ministry said, but they were allowed under Norilsk Nickel’s permit, signed by Rosprirodnadzor, the environmental agency. The agency declined repeated requests to respond to questions for this article.

Image: The Norilsk power plant No 1 supplies electricity to industrial enterprises of the Norilsk Nickel company, the world's largest producer of palladium and one of the largest producers Nickel, platinum and copper. (Kirill Kukhmar / TASS via Getty Images)More

“Nornickel’s factories operate under strict environmental restrictions and a set of established permits, which are prescribed in accordance with project documentation with an assessment of permissible impact standards,” Norilsk Nickel’s spokesman said about the discharges.

Ryabinin said he wasn’t surprised about the permits or the ministry’s response.

“In Russian, we have a saying: ‘It’s like throwing dried peas against the wall,’” he said. “The peas will just come right back to you. They won’t get to somebody else, to someone who is guilty of building this wall.”
Putin plays ‘the good czar’

Putin reacted sharply to news of the diesel spill last year, which came only weeks after he unveiled a new strategic plan for the Arctic, a vision of resource development and environmental protection going hand in hand.

“Why did the authorities find out about this only two days later?” Putin asked in a video conference call with regional and company officials. “Are we going to learn about emergencies from social networks?”

President Putin holds meeting on diesel fuel spill clean-up in Krasnoyarsk Territory (Alexei Nikolsky / TASS via Getty Images)

Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of books about Putin and about the long-lasting costs of the Soviet Union’s intensive development of Siberia, said about Putin, “This is him playing the role of the good czar, who has a direct connection with the people.”

But, she said, Putin doubtless is also aware of how environmental disaster can breed activism and awaken dissatisfaction with the government. After the deadly 1986 Chernobyl disaster, protests in Ukraine, Belarus and Estonia morphed into a full-fledged independence movement that helped bring about the Soviet Union’s collapse.

In the weeks after the Norilsk Nickel spill, five people were arrested or charged with criminal negligence, including the power plant’s director and chief engineer and Norilsk’s mayor at the time.

The London-based consulting firm Environmental Resources Management, which the Norilsk Nickel board hired to investigate the accident, found that it was caused by a confluence of a changing environment, carelessness and neglect. In February, a Russian court ruled that the company should pay a fine of 146 billion rubles, or $2 billion.

“We learned this lesson well,” Potanin said in a statement after the verdict. “We are carrying out the instructions of the President to eliminate the consequences of the accident and to restore the ecosystem.”

Norilsk Nickel has maintained that the cleanup effort collected more than 90 percent of the leaked fuel — if true, an extraordinary recovery rate. For oil spills in marine environments, the average recovery rate is 8 percent to 10 percent, and on rivers, 50 percent would be considered high, according to experts at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Oil Spill Recovery Institute at Cordova, Alaska.

Fuel spill cleanup in Norilsk, Russia (Kirill Kukhmar / TASS via Getty Image)

Image: Employees of Russia's state-owned oil pipeline monopoly Transneft during a clean-up operation following a massive fuel spill in the Ambarnaya River outside Norilsk on June 10, 2020. (Irina Yarinskaya / AFP via Getty Images)

Russian scientists determined that diesel fuel from the spill did reach Pyasino Lake and beyond. Contamination was found in bottom sediment in the lake and the entire 900-kilometer length of the adjoining Pyasino River, including at its mouth in the Arctic Ocean’s Kara Sea, said Vyacheslav Bizikov, the deputy director of the Russian government’s All-Russian Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography in Moscow, in an interview with Inside Climate News.

Bizikov led the expedition of scientists, who lived on boats for 17 days sampling water, sediment and fish. The researchers found both diesel fuel and heavy metal contamination in the liver and muscles of fish they tested, and they warned local authorities and Indigenous communities that the fish weren’t safe to eat, he said.

The findings became the basis of the lawsuit the Russian fisheries agency filed against Norilsk Nickel in July. The company and the agency are working out an agreement on how to further study the damage, restore the environment and replenish the fish, Bizikov said.

“We can restore and recover the ecosystems and water ecosystems if we do it right,” Bizikov said. “As I see it, it’s not a matter of one day or one year. If there will be no more accidents, we will manage to fix it. It’s difficult to say when, but in 10 years, maybe we will see the definite results.”

New pressures for change are building on Norilsk Nickel from the outside.

Electric vehicle batteries, which rely on nickel for energy density and storage, are a major growth opportunity for the company. Russia is one of the few places that have the sulfur-rich ore that readily yields the very pure-grade Class 1 nickel needed, a resource base that has made Norilsk Nickel the world’s leading producer.

Musk of Tesla has said that he has plenty of business to offer but that he wants to partner with companies that engage in sustainable practices. “Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way,” he said on a company earnings call last year.

Potanin has made clear his ambition to compete in this market, having announced that Norilsk Nickel will increase production of “green economy” metals by 30 percent to 40 percent by 2030.

Construction is now underway on a $4.1 billion project at Norilsk Nickel that the company has said will reduce sulfur dioxide air pollution 90 percent by 2025. The company has pledged to cut air pollution before, but has said the task was complicated by the remote environment. The new project began in earnest following the scrutiny the company received after its 2020 diesel fuel spill. (Norilsk Nickel)

‘We kill our children and leave them a trash heap’

Norilsk Nickel, pledging to cut sulfur dioxide emissions by 90 percent by 2025, has said it will spend at least $4.1 billion on a project called Sulphur Programme 2.0.

“In my opinion, the implementation of the project will fundamentally change the ecological situation in our city,” Norilsk’s current mayor, Dmitry Kasarev, who previously worked for Norilsk Nickel, said in written responses to questions from Inside Climate News. “Our city ​​should breathe a new breath in terms of ecology.”

Shvarts, who helped Norilsk Nickel develop its new environmental and climate strategy, said he supports the company’s striving to be part of the green economy. “We need to make every week, every month, a few new steps ahead to be a more transparent, more open, more environmentally responsible company,” he said.

Klyushin, however, won’t wait for that day to come. He has vowed to leave Norilsk soon and not return.

Igor Klyushin has watched pollution grow in Norilsk since moving here with his family as a 7-year-old in 1977. (Courtesy Igor Klyushin)

He worries about his friend Ryabinin, who has four children and hasn’t had a full-time job since he quit Rosprirodnadzor.

“If it were not for Vasily who started this, who discovered this, they would have avoided responsibility. This is clear,” Klyushin said.

Ryabinin said that since he quit the Russian environmental protection agency, he has been working as a freelance photographer and focusing on his children. He would like to take them to a place with more opportunity — and, of course, less pollution. But for now the family has no plans to move. His wife still works for Norilsk Nickel.

The experience of fighting the company changed him, Ryabinin said. The problem, he said, isn’t one company but consumption without any thought of where the raw material comes from or the need to use less.

“Until the bulk of the population of our planet comes to understand the reasonable consumption of any resources,” he said, “we will not achieve either economic growth or an environmentally friendly planet. We just simply kill our children and leave them a trash heap.”

Ludmila Mekertycheva in Moscow contributed to this report.

Motorcycle Monday: Cancel Culture Comes For Indian Motorcycle

Steven Symes
Mon, November 29, 2021, 

Should they bow to the pressure?

Whether you love or hate Indian Motorcycle, it’s likely you have an opinion about the brand’s name and logo. Actually, a lot of people who’ve never ridden a motorcycle in their life have hot takes on what should be done with Indian Motorcycle. It’s a topic which was dealt with back in the 90s before anyone had even heard of cancel culture, but that’s how long these types of sentiments have existed in society.

For now this issue has sat on the backburner, relegated to smaller media outlets and not the big corporate broadcasters and newspapers. That could change in a flash as we’ve seen a thing not previously in the spotlight suddenly become public enemy number one. Some argue Indian Motorcycle is profiting off the name and imagery of indigenous people, which they say is exactly like when different tribes were forcibly kicked off their land by white settlers. That’s a huge logical leap, but it’s the argument being levied with a lot of emotion mixed in so you don’t pay too much attention to the lack of logic or the fact some Native Americans don’t agree with the sentiment.

As mentioned before, there’s some turbulent history with the Indian Motorcycle brand, most notably a lawsuit in the 1990s after a deal to have a Native American tribe make the bikes fell apart. It’s a complicated legal case, but there was understandably a lot of bad blood from that deal gone sour.

More recently, a few voices in the motorcycle world have decided the time is now for Indian to change its name and logo. I’ll let them explain in their own words.

Canada MotoGuide ran an op-ed in March of this year where the author states, “As the world becomes more PC-friendly, I do think that the name and branding will do more harm than good, ultimately having a negative impact on sales in the future. I certainly don’t want to see the company fail, nor do I wish anything but the best for those who make their living and support their families working for the company. I merely think that supporting and perpetuating a certain pattern of cultural appropriation is best left in the past.”

New Zealand motorcycle publication On Throttle ran a similar piece about this topic also in March, the author stating he didn’t want to attack the oldest motorcycle brand in America. However, he argued “while the company is not outwardly racist, there are problems with the brand that have not been addressed in regards to the cultural appropriation”

More thoughtful dialog can be found on a 4-year-old Reddit post where the author asks if the name and logo for Indian Motorcycle is offensive. The top answer was succinct: “I have never owned one but do not feel anything negative about it. I used to run Native Net, 67 reservations, where we discussed problem areas and this was never brought up by any of the Native nations.” Another user pointed out that sometimes perceptions are off due to a lack of understanding, like how people think the gunmaker Savage Arms is racist because of the name combined with an Indian’s head in the logo. In that case, the founder’s last name was Savage and he traded with a chief who gave his permission to use his likeness, likely because he found it to be an honor and not mockery.

Nothing from the history of Indian Motorcycle suggests a connection between the founders of the company and any Native American group. However, it seems they used names like Chief, Scout, and Chieftain to convey strength, not as mockery. Some take the usages as just the opposite.

I grew up in a state where there were a lot of Native Americans. I had friends who were from different tribes or pueblos and others who were part Native American. I also attended college with many Native Americans and discussed cultural topics with some. I live right next to two reservations and have lived around Native Americans my entire life. From my own life experience, the one thing I can say with 100 percent certainty is that if anyone is trying to tell you all Native Americans feel or think a certain thing, they’re not being honest. Some hate things like Indian Motorcycles. Others think they’re cool and are proud owners of an Indian, others that they’re silly, and some have no opinion on the topic. In other words, trying to argue that the brand name and logo offends all Native Americans is simply untrue.

For Polaris’ and Indian Motorcycle's part, they seem to be sensitive to the potential controversy. While they continue to use legacy names, no new model names have even a hint of indigenous roots. They haven’t added any extra Indian-themed imagery to the motorcycles and you won’t find anything like that in dealerships, or at least that’s the direction the dealers have been given by Indian Motorcycles.

There are plenty of reasons to not like Indian Motorcycle. Some have an issue with the parent company, Polaris. Others aren’t a fan of the bike designs or they don’t like how they ride. I know people who really hate the quality or reliability of Indians. But for now it seems like the effort to build pressure to cancel the brand name and logo isn’t exactly catching on in the motorcycle world and it may never.

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I HAD THE PLEASURE OF SEEING A POST WWII INDIAN RECONSTRUCTED AND THE GREATER PLEASURE OF RIDING IT.